Farewell to Rust Hills

Via The New York Times: L. Rust Hills, Fiction Editor at Esquire, Dies at 83. Excerpt:

L. Rust Hills, a staunch advocate of contemporary American literature who, as Esquire’s curmudgeonly fiction editor in three separate stints from the 1950s through the 1990s, published original works by scores of the country’s finest writers, died on Tuesday in Belfast, Me. He was 83 and lived in Key West, Fla.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said a friend, the writer Christopher Buckley.

A shrewd reader with a keen ear for an original voice and a sure sense of the distinction between new writing and merely fashionable writing, Mr. Hills upheld standards he unashamedly thought of as literary.

The list of distinguished writers he championed early in and throughout their careers is long and comprises several generations. To name just a handful: Norman Mailer, John Cheever, William Styron, Bruce Jay Friedman, William Gaddis, James Salter, Don DeLillo, Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver and E. Annie Proulx.

I have a faint recollection of hearing Rust Hills speak at Columbia, but I certainly knew who he was, and how important he was. Especially in the late 50s and early 60s, Esquire was one of the really big literary magazines. Every issue was an event—a provocative essay by Mailer, a short story by Styron or Gaddis. For aspiring young writers, Hills and Esquire showed that you could not just get published; you could make an impact.

We are now long past the age when editors actually edited. Now they make deals. Almost every book I read reminds of that, because today's books—fiction and nonfiction alike—are embarrassingly under-edited.

Spelling and grammatical errors are too numerous to count. Worse yet are passages that are so dull or poorly written that even your word processor's style guide would flag them for revision (or excision). Yet somehow they get past today's editors.

The problem seems to lie with publishers' bottom-line priorities. It costs money to do serious editing. In the Golden Age of American literature, roughly 1920-1970, publishers actually thought money wasn't quite as important as identifying good new writers and fostering their careers. If that meant hiring editors like Maxwell Perkins and Rust Hills, so be it. Today's corporate mentality is just looking for the next blockbuster, regardless of quality.

You can still find good editors here and there. Thirty years after my first novel appeared, I'm still grateful to Judy-Lynn Del Rey and Owen Lock for the attention they gave it. My editors at Self-Counsel Press are patient and meticulous; they've saved me from embarrassing myself on more than one page.

But it's more a matter of luck than certainty. So we owe Rust Hills our gratitude for setting an example that some still follow.

Comments

[Greg]

Thanks for that information about Hills. Do you think this shift to a corporate mentality creates new opportunities for small presses to fill a void? Or is the shift merely a response to the audience's taste changing? Maybe print fiction has become a proving ground for new media such as television, film, and video games. I'd like to think there are still critical readers out there who enjoy words.